Ripple’s Email Builder allows you to create customized and personalized emails to send to participants. With the Email Builder, you can drag and drop different elements to organize text, images, and more to style and brand your emails. Use the email builder to create emails that remind participants of study activities, thank them for their participation, provide updates on a study, and include information about current and future studies.
Email Template Builder Overview
Creating a New Template:
To create a new template, navigate to the Study Settings (red) and then Email & Text (green). Click “Add Template” to open up a template (purple).
This will open up a new template with the following fields:
- Template Name (required): This is the name that your team will see in the list of email templates. This should be a few words that help define what the email template is for. Participants will not see this name.
- Description: Allows you to give more information about the contents of the email. This can include when to use the template, who it should go to, when, etc. Participants will not see this description.
- Reply to Address: Allows you to route participant replies to your email address for further follow-up.
- Sender Name: Emails will come from email@ripplescience.com. The Sender Name allows you to mask Ripple's email address and display your team's name as the sender.
- Email Subject (required): Allows you to customize the subject of the email that the participant will receive.
Email Body:
You can drag and drop content into the body to create your email. The email body updates in real-time when you add more content and blocks, or change the properties of the body. You can click on the elements you’ve added to customize and edit further.
Content Elements:
The Content (red) section contains elements (green) that you can drag and drop to add words, images, and other styling elements to your email.
Click on the element’s name in the list above to learn more about how to cusomize the appearance, layout and content related to each element to build an email template.
- Columns: Break rows into different sections or columns for design arrangement
- Heading: Add pre-sized text
- Text: Add text that is not pre-sized
- Image: Add images and logos
- Button: Add a button to navigate to another URL or create and send an email
- Divider: Add a horizontal line to create division between sections
- HTML: Add custom HTML to the design
- Menu: Create navigation menus
Blocks:
Blocks allow you to customize the layout or arrangement of the email. The body of the email can be divided into different sections so that you can add elements, spacing, and styling to separate ideas or calls-to-action. You can read more about Blocks here.
Body:
The Body allows you to change the overall settings of the email, including the text color, background color, content alignment, font, and more. This is a great way to ensure the content in your email follows a standard format. If needed, you can change properties within an element so that it doesn’t default to the settings you set in the Body section. You can read more about the Body here.
Undo and Redo Recent Changes:
The Email Builder also includes tools to help you make changes and preview your emails. If you make a mistake when you’re editing the email you can undo recent changes. Or, if you change you mind you can redo. The buttons to undo and redo are at the bottom left corner of the builder.
Preview your Email:
Before you send or schedule your email, you can preview what it will look like if your recipients view it on different devices.
Templates are responsive, so you can use these sections to design different experiences for mobile and desktop devices. You can click on the desktop and mobile icons to see what your email will look like on different devices (red). You can use the responsive design sections to change how the email looks on the different devices.
You can click on the eye icon for an accurate preview of how it will look on different devices (green). In the preview window, you can choose different device sizes for desktops, tablets, and mobile phones. You can learn more about previewing your template here.
Attachments:
You can add up to 1 attachment per email. The attachment cannot exceed more than 10 MB.
Automatically Send Based On:
You can automate emails to go out based on a date in Ripple. Emails can go out before or after the following date types:
- Event dates
- Custom Variable dates
- Date Added to Study
- Date Added to Potential
- Date Added to Enrolled
- Birthday
- Last Contact Date
If you do not want the email to go out automatically, you can leave this section blank and choose to use the template whenever you want. You can learn more about how to send an email here.
Save and Delete:
The Save and Delete buttons allow you to save and delete your template respectively. When you click the Save button, it will automatically close out the template and return you to the Email Template list. When you click the Delete button and confirm that you are sure, it will delete your email, close out the template window, and return you to the Email Template list. You can’t restore a deleted template.
Copy your Template:
You can also make an exact copy of your email template. You can choose to copy the template and remain on it (red) or copy the template and close it out (green). You can read more about copying your template in this article.
